Midair Rescue Lifts Passengers From Stranded East River Tram

Published: April 19, 2006

A four-minute trip on the Roosevelt Island Tramway yesterday turned into a harrowing ordeal that lasted hours as a series of power failures left about 70 people suspended hundreds of feet in the air, forcing a daring late-night rescue over the East River.

About 11 p.m., after the passengers on two tram cars, one headed in each direction, had been hanging for more than six hours, rescuers began moving them into a large orange wire gondola from the tram headed to Roosevelt Island, which was suspended over the East River. Passengers were pulled from the side door and loaded into the gondola, which had a capacity of about a dozen people. By midnight, 22 of the approximately 50 people in the Roosevelt Island-bound tram had been rescued in two trips, including 12 children and an elderly woman who was using a walker.

Cheers erupted when the first group, with eight children and five adults, touched ground at the Roosevelt Island terminal about 11:30 p.m. The children exchanged high-fives with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. They were greeted with juice, cookies and, for several Hasidic Jews in the first group, matzo.

''I felt like I was a movie stuntman a little bit,'' said Dax Maier, 12, after he was rescued. ''I just told myself,'Don't look down.' '' Dax was heading over to Roosevelt Island with his baby-sitter for tennis lessons.

The second rescue, which was completed at 12:20 a.m. today, took longer because among the nine passengers was an elderly woman using a walker and hard of hearing. Because the last portion of the rescue trip involved climbing down a 10-foot ladder, rescuers had to lower her down on the pulley.

Early today, rescuers were debating whether to use a crane with a basket to rescue the passengers who were in the tram suspended over Manhattan near First Avenue. The people would be brought either onto the bridge or onto land.

If not, they planned to use the gondola, which had crawled the 3,100-foot-long stretch of cable with self-generated diesel power, to empty the Manhattan-bound tram, with 22 people -- 21 passengers and the conductor.

Passengers remainedly largely calm as they were transferred from the tram car to the orange gondola in midair.

After the first group arrived, Mr. Bloomberg held a briefing on the Roosevelt Island side. ''We want to get out of this with nobody injured,'' he said, ''and hopefully we learned something about how this will not happen again.'' He also said city officials had talked to officials at the agency that oversees the tram, the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation, , a quasi-public corporation that was set up in 1984 to oversee services to the island. ''We will do an evaluation tomorrow on what went wrong,'' he said.

The ordeal began shortly before 5 p.m. when the power went out, leaving the two tram cars, which each can hold 125 people, motionless on cables that rise as high as 250 feet above the East River between the East Side of Manhattan and Roosevelt Island.

Officials said the diesel generator that powers the system failed, and then the backup generator stopped working as well. Efforts to manually crank in the cars back also proved fruitless, officials said.

Anxious relatives and city officials waited on land, squinting upward and using cellphones to talk with the trapped passengers, who included several children heading to Roosevelt Island for after-school activities. By 10:30 p.m., Mayor Bloomberg had joined the crowd.

Family members of Rick Lazio, the former Republican congressman and Senate candidate from Long Island, were among those in midair. His wife, Patricia, had been taking their 12-year-old daughter, Kelsey, to a tennis lesson on the island.

''I think the information flow has been pretty abysmal,'' said Mr. Lazio, in an interview from his Manhattan apartment about 10 p.m. ''One of the problems is that the official communication has been extremely wanting, so people would get information from different sources, like cellphones.''

''It's difficult for me to understand when you have a primary means of transportation over to an island, you don't have a backup plan in terms of retrieving the people who are caught in a situation like this,'' Mr. Lazio said.

Rescuers, including members of the police Emergency Service Unit who are also trained medical technicians, had set up a station at the Roosevelt Island terminal, but there were no reported injuries.

The ordeal was especially difficult for people who did not like heights. Mary Hirschhorn said her husband, Alan Hirschhorn, one of the stranded passengers, was among them. ''He's very nervous,'' she said. ''He's upset. I'm never going to take it again.''

It was the second time the tram had stalled for hours in the past eight months, raising questions about the aging system, which began service in 1976. ''The whole tram system is 30 years old,'' said Judith A. Berdy, president of the Roosevelt Island Historical Society. ''They have new cabs, new windows, new cables, but it's old equipment.''

In September, the tram stalled for two hours. Power was restored after the only engineer who could fix that problem was brought in from Westchester County by police helicopter.

The tram, originally built by a Swiss company, Vonroll Limited, for $5 million, is now operated by the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation. Agency officials could not be reached for comment last night.

The system, which calls itself the only aerial commuter tram in the country, has been featured in movies including ''City Slickers,'' starring Billy Crystal; ''Nighthawks,'' with Sylvester Stallone; and ''Spider-Man'' in 2002.

Lee Anne Siegel, 30, was taking her 14-month-old daughter, Riley, to the island to play in a park. Her husband, Jordan Siegel, was waiting for his wife in Manhattan last night. ''It's the first time they've been over there,'' he said. ''I'm thinking Central Park from now on.''

Photos: A rescue gondola was maneuvered over the East River last night to transfer stranded passengers from the Roosevelt Island Tramway. (Photo by Richard Perry/The New York Times)(pg. A1); Rescue workers helped a child from a wire gondola last night. (Photo by Robert Stolarik for The New York Times); A tug and barge passed under one of the paralyzed trams last night on the East River. (Photo by Richard Perry/The New York Times)(pg. B3)

Map of Manhattan showing approximate locations of stalled tram cars: Two tram cars, one headed in each direction, were left motionless. (pg. B3)